Apparently planet.gnome.org is now subscribed to my blog, or the other way around... I am not that familiar to rss terminology. Thus this entry shall serve three purposes, firstly, to test if everything works correctly (not that I lack faith in Jeff's ability to operate his own site). Secondly to introduce myself to those on that site who my infamy has not reached, and thirdly to prove to the faithless that I am actually serious about blogging.

Personal Introduction

My name is Caleb Moore, I live in Sydney Australia. Most of my meaningful free software contributions have been to librsvg the component of gnome that is used to render the beautiful vector graphics that you may or may not use for your desktop icons. I have worked on the library for about a year and I like to tell myself that I have made some fairly impressive improvements to it. Unless I am really angry about something, I spend a fair bit of time talking about librsvg whenever I blog because I don't find my personal life all that interesting. That is not to say I don't have a full compliment of self-righteous opinions that inevitably have been and will be stated regardless of whether people want to listen or not. Hopefully my style will mean that what I write won't be too painful to read if you choose to read it. I apologize in advance if it is.

Project promotion

Librsvg is currently the project that I am interested in. I hope some of you have encountered it at some time and have not been too infuriated with it. I originally started helping out with it when I got annoyed about how crap it was back when I was involved with the sodipodi flag collection. I've spent a lot of time working on it and have pretty much gutted it and restructured the insides. Personally I think it is much nicer now, especially given its enhanced standard support and now poor artists don't have to make their images "rsvg friendly" which was a drag to all involved.

Shameless project boasting session

We've decided to take a little initiative and lead the way into gnome adopting cairo. We figure that if gnome is to move towards being a vector based desktop, we're probably a good candidate to take the first step. This also hopefully will have the added benefit of taking stress of Carl Worth (Carl previously maintained an SVG library himself) so he can have more time for working on cairo itself. Anyway, regardless of gnome's direction, cairo support will make SVG loading FLY. We'll still have a libart backend of cause which will work in roughly the same way as it always has, it would be a shame to break backwards compatibility, it would also be a little rude to make a project started my Raph Levian cease to support his original vector rendering library at all.

Meaningless coda because I don't know how to end this

I am happy to be here and I hope that I can be a entertaining, agreeable and insightful member of this community (this of cause applies to both planet.gnome.org and advogato.org). Please expect updates... but don't bet the farm on it.